Building Worlds in Middle of the Night Comfort.

I like to lie awake at night, working out details and plots, the ideas behind the words – Writing is all about ideas and words, of course, but there’s a difference between them and that difference either allows me to stay in bed or drives me out of it.

If it’s words that are flowing through my mind, actual dialogue or description, no doubt about it, I have to get at that keyboard and capture them because I’ve learned that when there is a handful of those wonderful things coming at me, there’s likely to be the entire flock about to swoop in, and I want every last one of them. If I don’t capture them, by morning they will be gone.

Ideas, on the other hand, don’t float away. Ideas are both detailed and structural. Detailed ideas are more along the lines of how something happens, while the structural ideas form the backbone of the plot, the What and Why of the story.